A Teacher's Impact Beyond Measure

Miss Harding. Two words that could undermine the confidence of a couple of generations of students.

On Saturday, the formidable retired English teacher was inducted into the South Windsor High School Hall of Fame.

Alexander the Great famously observed, "I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well." He wasn't in my class, but Carol Harding could have inspired that thought. As Gov. Dannel P. Malloy takes an election season break from his war on teachers, I'd like to acknowledge my debt to Miss Harding.

Imagine Katherine Hepburn's voice with a Worcester accent, topped by a head of Lucille Ball's fire-red hair. Some referred to her as Big Red, but I've never had that much nerve. Think of the best teachers you had, the ones who shaped your mind and view of the world, and the picture is complete.

I was always a reader, but Miss Harding's semester course on the small town in American literature opened the world for me. Not many English teachers were introducing students to Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," the slim novel that set the course for the modern American novel, never as widely read as works by the writers it inspired.

"Winesburg, Ohio" is a collection of related stories of the varied, often disappointing lives of the people of a single small town. There's a fair amount of torment, along with the burden wrought by cruel conformity in a stifling age. The novel broke conventions when it was published in 1915. It felt like adult fare decades later.

Miss Harding loved to challenge. She recognized that students are different. Miss Harding could incite, guide and mediate a discussion on the vast range of topics and questions that a finely written novel prompts in the right hands. One day you might discover that she taught you how to fling a pungent phrase across the page.

It is a rare talent that can engage a roomful of 16-year-olds with Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology," a collection of epitaphs rendered in poems. I don't know how you create a standardized test to measure that. Nor can I think of how we quantify the young lives guided through tumult and instilled with wonder and ambition.

What's the test for kindness and compassion? How many questions will that fill on an exam? Most teachers lead a classroom of students with a wide range of backgrounds and abilities. There is an infinite variety of chaos in the world. Miss Harding's class was an island of bliss, with frequent reminders of what wonders awaited her students. She delivered a pointed optimism about the world while you struggled to understand what this diagraming of a sentence was all about. Every insight and quip was delivered and received with dignity for all. I wonder how you test for that.

We have high expectations of our public school teachers. They cannot meet them alone. Children need to make it to school. Districts in which absences are high are likely to perform poorly. Students who do not regularly show up at school probably have something going wrong at home. Anyone, but especially a child, will struggle during the day if he or she is up all night taking care of a sibling.

We all know of famous exceptions, but a child of a single-parent family faces hurdles that one with an intact two-parent family does not. Single parents, usually women, have often been abandoned by the father of their children. Most of American poverty is visited upon women who have been left by a man to raise his children.

Even the powerful Carol Hardings of the world cannot solve that epidemic. Talented faculty members can identify and manage many problems, but they can't provide a proper parent or make sure a student has food for dinner at home. They can help students cope, maybe rescue a student in crisis, listen and comfort. Often they provide guide rails for the wobbly, but it's not the best use of their talents.

Introducing students to new worlds of knowledge, thought and creativity. That's what a great teacher unleashed does. So thank you, Miss Harding, a Hall of Famer, indeed.

Kevin Rennie is a lawyer and a former Republican state legislator. He can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com.